For $14 an hour, one would think that an amateur hero wouldn't have to put up with too much bullshit. Just a bit of parttime work between ordinary life, nothing too simple but nothing quite so difficult either. Mr. Youngfist wasn't too sure his job description involved fighting mountains. He was also fairly sure it didn't entail running across skyscrapers hundreds of feet in the air from an enormous outstretched hand that hit like a meteor yet soared like a fighter jet. He moved, one step at a time, one swoop over another, spending more time hurdling over precarious gaps at insane speeds than actually taking his footing among the crumbling building rubble. If he were able to stand still and turn slightly to his side, he would see his opponent, kneeled over in the middle of the city. A young woman who could be either a teenage girl or a thirty-year-old woman depending on which way you looked at it, with a voice that would be the darned sweetest thing if it weren't booming overhead like the voice of god. A woman who was large enough that even as she kneeled still towered over the vast majority of the city like a child or overly obsessed hobbyist might loom over a somewhat oversized model city. But the city was no model, and she was no child.

Not that the hero Youngfist could see any of that right now, as at the moment his entire vision was a blur of crumbling rubble and purplish holographic fields of antigravity, signs of what could vaguely be considered a superpower if you squinted your eyes and looked at it from the right angles. It wasn't much, but those small purple clouds were all that was keeping him alive, as he zipped and zoomed through the buildings as her hand casually brushed through dozens of feet of metal, concrete, and other raw materials that all would probably just look like pebbles and sand if you were a multi-hundred feet giant. Speaking of which, the giant hand, was breaking through the skyscraper he was currently stuck in. Glass and wood flew through the air as what he assumed was an office of some sort quickly became an office of no sort as the hand swept through the room. It took up nearly a third of the room, demolishing chairs, panels, desks, and various electronics without stopping. He felt a little claustrophobic just looking at something so large in such a tight space. Youngfist did what Youngfist did best and ran for his life, climbing over several overturned tables as the hand blindly felt out for his presence. What light still remained in the room dimly reflected a wall of all encroaching fabric, a golden sort of cream that shivered and shook with unnerving regularity as the giant breathed in and out.

This was how Youngfist had been "fighting" the villain up to this point. He clung to various oddly placed poles and windowsills scattered throughout the city as he broke several parkour records scrambling from collapsing tower to collapsing tower. He certainly couldn't outrun the hand of god, but he could duck and dive through the group of crumbling towers to try to avoid it. It felt humiliating to try and fight something so impossibly large yet nimble like this. He wasn't even fighting her, he was fighting her right hand. And he wasn't even fighting that, he was avoiding it like a coward. It broke through his fields like a spoon through whipped cream, broke through steel and concrete with durability that didn't even make sense for a being of her size, broke through the room like an unstoppable wave of destruction. And even avoiding was perhaps a word too far, as right as he stopped to see where the hand was it swooped right above him, grabbing him with an all-powerful crushing force that plunged his entire body into still darkness. It tore him from the building, only opening to let in a bit of air, sky, and the illuminating grin of Angel's Kiss, the city's latest and greatest supervillainess.

"Good morning, hero!" she said with a sweet chipper enthusiasm that bore a hole into his eardrums and dug a tidy little nest there.

Youngfist coughed up a bit of blood. He wasn't entirely sure whether she could hear the pebble sized "person" in the palm of her hand, but he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of hearing his wheezy gasps of air. At least, not with actual words attached to them.

"I said, hello hero." She repeated.

Youngfist coughed blood and a bit of what very could have been part of his right lung.

"Oh well, I thought it would have been nice to talk. Anyways, this part of the city... um... what's left of it? is now under the control of the Heavenly Host, and that's that. You can go now!"

Youngfist coughed again.

"You can go now. Off you go. To the birds!"

He wasn't quite sure if he could still physically move his legs anymore.

"Uh, leave. Now. Please?"

No response.

"I mean if you want to stay, that's fine with me, but I'll have to bring you back to the hideout with the rest of the Angelic Hosts, and I don't think they're anywhere near as nice or anything; they might interrogate you."

The hero stared blankly at the giant woman, more giant girl than anything else. She looked rather young now, now that he thought about it more. Her outfit was nothing more than a giant sheet of cloth cut into the form of a dress, with two cotton angel wings on the back that would have looked comically undersized for her back if she wasn't an 800 foot tall colossus.

"Pretty please fly away now mr hero sir! You were talking so much before we fought and now that I finally have you, you aren't flying away or saying anything!"

"..."

The giant smiled. "Well, if you don't have anything to say..."

A radiance emanated from around the corners of Angel's eyes, danced on her eyelids before spraying out along her eyelashes, growing and growing until his entire field of vision was filled with a terrifying, penetrating light. And then came a laugh as if from God himself.

"I guess I'll have to use my Divine Sight to see what's on your mind.  Let's see..."

It was as if someone had burned off all the skin on Youngfist's chests. He was still thoroughly in the monster's grasp, sure, and dangling hundreds of feet above the ground, yes, but he felt a searing pain within himself. He was unwinding, string by string, and soon there wouldn't be much left to do.

"Hm... there sure is a lot to sort through. Are you sure you don't wanna talk?"

Youngfist coughed up blood. He suspected that he wouldn't have much more time to stall before his backup arrived. Or he died, whichever came first. "Y...you...."

"Oh, were you saying something?" asked Angel. She held her hands closer to her head. The boiling light faded, and now her smooth, endless face took up his field of vision.

"I-I told you earlier that-" began Youngfist, coughing up a bit more organ. "That I had three secrets, do you remember them?"

"But what does that have to do with anything?"

"Do you remember them or not?"

"Um," began Angel, taking little note of how her volume was deafening the broken hero in her hands.

"Well you first talked about how you could make those pretty tiny floaty clouds you were using to bounce through the air earlier. Then, you talked about your fancy moves when you were flying through the skyscrapers right just then..."

"Yes, yes."

"And then.... Then... what did you say for the third one?"

"I said.... I said..." began Youngfist, abruptly stopping.

"What did you say?"

"I said," shouted Youngfist, clearing his throat out, "that.... That..."

"That Youngfist always carries a friend!"

Youngfist heard the boom before he felt his entire body whip backwards at blinding speeds. He couldn't make it out, but by that clear crisp ringing in his ear he knew that the punch had landed perfectly into the side of Angle's face, the sheer force laying her flat out on the street, and flinging him through the air... right towards what he could only presume was another standing building. Youngfist was beginning to have some very strong thoughts about the superhero biz, thoughts he couldn't quite have time to articulate before his face slammed hard into solid concrete and glass at a couple hundred miles per hour, casting his entire world into the sweet, sweet, murky black release of unconsciousness.

The dust that clouded the city had begun to settle. A good bit of uptown was just straight up gone now, disappeared underneath the impossible weight of a teenage girl. Where the villainess once stood now stood another young woman of perhaps the same age, with deep black hair, soft, round facial features and a blue and pink jumpsuit so bright it almost certainly counted as a flight hazard. She was grinning. 

"Big Betty, reporting for duty!"

Angel slowly returned to her feet, looking up at the amazon who now challenged her for supremacy of the skies. If she made the city look like a model kit to a young toddler, Betty was the fully grown adult looming over all of it. The highest buildings in this part of downtown barely reached her hip, where some of the smaller buildings barely managed to reach her knees. It was somewhat humbling, if anything. Angel looked up, unflinching, at the new challenger

"Excuse me m'am, but who are you? Have you heard the Good Word of the Dragon Lord?"

"Dragon Lord?" asked the taller giant.

"Yes, our good Dragon Lord who carries an Axe and desires his Will be it to smite the sinful lands of this earth!" said the villain. "Um, have you been properly introduced to Him?"

"I can't say I have." Said the taller giant. She looked down at a building she assumed carried her partner. "Hey, Young, if this isn't technically Christian, I can like, shittalk her and not have to get shit for it later, right? Everyone in this city can hear everything I say, I don't wanna start up a holy war or anything."

There wasn't a response that she could hear, but she assumed that Youngfist agreed with her. She tended to do that a lot in these situations.

"I'll take that as a yes."

"I do not know who you are talking to, but could I ask you one other question?"

"Yeah sure, ask away or whatever."

"Why are you dressed like a prostitute?" said the young villain, pointing to the heroine's chest, where the jumpsuit was "conveniently" unzipped, revealing more than a few hundred tons of PG-13 sensuality.

The heroine remained silent.

"Oh, I am sorry, did I offend you? I just saw that your breasts were bared so blatently, and with your suit so tight I only assumed-"

"You know what? I am really, really going to enjoy kicking the absolute shit out of you, Mrs... whats your face."

"Angel, m'am. I also hope that we-"

The heroine grabbed hold of Angel, lifting her up like a toddler and pushing her face square into her chest. She took special care to rub as tightly as she good. She waited a beat. Then another. And a couple more for good measure. Then she was briefly distracted by how pleasant the sounds of the city burning were, before she remembered that she was supposed to be in a life or death struggle or something.

She pulled Angel out, watching her adorable little struggles and pent up facial expression of the cutest little fruitless rage a girl could ask for, in between her desperate gasps for air, of course.

"Still think I'm dressed like a whore?"

"You are a very foul mouthed young lady."

Betty threw the girl back to the ground. It was a bit much for a starting blow, but the sensuality got her more publicity. More publicity meant more sponsors meant more money, after all. She was almost certain that this was how superheroes worked. She stepped back to give herself a running start, then leaped over Angel for a pretty kickass piledriver that basically leveled what was left of uptown. Today was going to be a good day.

On the ground, it was Armageddon taken flesh. The titans clashed far up above. Each clash shook the foundations harder than the last. It seemed as though the giants had taken control over the ground itself. The streets were mostly empty by now, the few city dwellers unlucky enough to be still stuck in the warzone currently hiding for their lives underneath whatever pinned down objects they could find, hidden in clothing stores underneath whatever shelves and desks could be found as the world they knew began to tear at the seams by the world inhabited by the two gods fighting far, far up above. There they hid, businessmen and food cart vendors alike huddling together, whatever rank and stature they held rendered meaningless in the face of such raw displays of absolute power.

A businessman was among them, a wealthy executive. He was not of the city at all; his company had simply sent him here for an important meeting. He was pinned behind a heavy glass jewelry case, alongside a saleswoman working for the store. The display was close enough to the sidewalk he could feel the wind from the broken windows run against his skin. And the sidewalk was in turn a skip away from the curb. And his luxury sports car was parked on that curb, about 10 meters away from the store. It was right there. His escape was right there.

Taking a long, deep breath, the man steadied his nerves and stood up. Another quake rang through the store. He staggered, but managed to hold his stance. He hurled himself above the display. The ground shook. He fell on his side. Glass shards jutted into his arm. The businessman clenched his teeth, and made a run for the street, whipping his head to see his car, lightly damaged, parked right on the corner of the street. With a last push of his strength, the businessman ran for the car. The ground cracked open, followed by a wail of pain from the sky that tore a hole in the fabric of the man's mind as he finally reached his car. This couldn't have been real, he convinced himself. He knew there were people who could punch through skyscrapers and outrun jet engines, he knew that there were things that defied the laws of science and stuff, but these.... Things defied reason itself. He looked up. He could see them from here. They were a little blurry due to the clouds, but he could see them. Two girls that very well could have been his own stood far above the tops of the skyscrapers.

As far as anyone could tell, there were two giantesses there. One, the original who had been destroying the city, the one with the giant silky dress and long golden hair. And the second one, the supposed hero in that ridiculous getup. He had certainly never heard of either of them. Did they even know what they were doing? That every wrong step cost millions in property damage? That every careless scream rang out with the sort of thunder that silenced rock concerts? That every stomp sent people flying into the air like lifeless ragdoll? Did they understand that their very presence, their powerful figures dominating the skyline, rendered every other living soul in the city a toy, props against the backdrop of their stage? And what if they did know? What if they knew, but liked it?

The ground shook again. The man broke from his trance and began franticly searching through his pockets for his keys. Every loud rumble in the distance brought his heartrate up a pace. His breaths were staggered and uneven. He felt his shaking hands grasp cold metal, and jammed the keys into the car. Throwing himself into the safety of the vehicle, the businessman immediately turned on the car. He took a deep breath as the engine roared to life.

He realized his mistake instantly. A deep darkness rolled over the entire street as the rumbling and shaking took to a fever pitch, nearly turning the car over. In the distance he could see two feet, each taking up a significant part of the adjacent street bisecting his current street. She barely fit. He knew that if he looked up, up, and up he would see the golden angel herself far above. And he knew, by the powerful rumbling he felt in his chest, what was coming next. He pushed the car into reverse, slamming the pedal down, but it was too late. He felt it happen in slow motion, the sound of an impossibly huge living force slamming into an impossibly huge living wall, the enormous feet down the street slipping out as the giantess's body coated the entire street in shadow. Then he saw it. From his dashboard, he could make out the beginnings of a pale, fleshy moon far above him. He could make out every goosebump on it as it flew up, up above his head. He could see it, a dark chasm parting the flesh in two. He could see the lumps, the curvature, practically imagine the feeling of being pinned against something so plush, so perfect. An ass perfect beyond comprehension was just about to land on him. He realized all this in near a second, right as the hundreds of thousands of tons of woman crashed down, completely erasing the man, the car, and the entire street in half an instant. 

Back up top, Betty was beginning to feel a bit tired. Just a bit, but enough to bother her. Angel, wherever she came from, was putting up one hell of a fight. Every time she lay her flat on her ass again she just seemed to shrug her blows off and get back up for a mean uppercut to the jaw. Betty didn't want any of this to get too bloody, when your droplets flooded swimming pools it just made sense, but things were getting pretty rough.

Betty through a punch. Angel was staggered, crashing through a fancy building named after some cable company whose name she couldn't quite remember. But she got up again, leaping up into the air with a punch that rose from her waist, arced perfectly as if from David himself, and landed perfectly on Betty's cheek, spinning her head like a top and sending her entire body crashing like a meteor over parts of Chinatown. Which sucked, because Betty was very much a big fan of that place, and it was hard to go back to a restaurant after you get labeled as the dumbass who crushed the damn thing under your fat ass. Angel was persistent, she might even call her a bit of a scrappy, but she couldn't possibly keep up her performance forever.

But there Angel was, leaping overhead, blotting out the sun with her bodyslam as she crashed over Betty, holding each of her arms down and pinning them both in place.

"This seems kinda gay, aren't you guys against that life?"

"I don't understand you. It's a miracle of our Lord that I can even be this large, how can you possibly match, let alone exceed..."

"Imma stop you right there and say it's magic, don't ask any further questions."

Angel squinted. "That doesn't make sense. There's plenty of magic, which the heathens and heretics alike use, but I've never seen a magic that could do something like this."

"Well you haven't seen a lot of magic then. Done, close the case, end of discussion."

"I wonder if..."

While to Betty it didn't feel like getting judged by a god, she most definitely did feel how uncomfortable it felt to have the light of a trillion Queen concerts trained directly on your soul's deepest regrets and frustrations. And she most definitely felt uncomfortable with what she knew was going to happen next.

Angel groaned. "Ugh, you guys always have so much sin hidden under the surface. Let's see... where do your powers come from?"

There was a beeping and a booping that Betty took as the sounds of searching, then a clean ding.

"You don't know what you're doing."

"I know exactly what I'm-"

Betty couldn't see exactly what Angel saw at that exact moment. But the look on Angel's face, that sudden shift from curiosity to shock to confusion to disgust to the awful, terrible pain of realization said enough. And she knew from experience exactly what would happen next. Because the longer Angel looked, the deeper and deeper she saw into Betty, she would eventually come across a room. A room that would lead to another dimension. Not a physical dimension, like the second or the third, or time, not an alternate dimension or timeline, another realm entirely. A pocket space, filled entirely with pink endlessness. Pink waves crashing against pink shores that fed pink rivers powering pink wheels and turning pink gears in an insidious pink machine. Pink on pink on pink on darker pink forever and ever and ever. And that slight shift in her expression just then, from realization to an unthinkable fear, said exactly what needed to be said.

But Angel said it anyways. "That's... that's all... flesh."

Betty sighed. "Yep. Everything you see in that world... that's all me. A planet, a solar system, a whole cosmos of Betty-ness forever and ever and ever. Everything I am here, everything I summon to make myself grow or shrink or warp or morph or whatever, that's all me, all the time. And I can feel it staring dead into you right now. What do you think it's feeling right now?"

"It's all flesh. It's all flesh. It's all flesh."

"Yep. All flesh. Forever. Meat on top of meat on top of meat. This is what I am. I mean, what we all are, but I'm just a bit more of it than everyone else."

"No, no... I won't have it!"

Angel seemed to at once break out of her trance. She pushed up, summoning a ball of white in her fists of such brightness that for an instant there was a second sun, growing and growing until a blinding whiteness was all that the city could see, feel, or know.

"I'll clean you, I'll clean this city, I'll clean this world of this... monstrocity! No, no, no no, no!"

The whiteness ate, and ate, and ate... and then started to recede. And when the brightness settled, in its place was an emptiness. And in that emptiness was a crater. And in that crater was a crying, 5 foot 4 teenage girl who had seen far, far, far into madness's crimson red door.

Youngfist started to come to his senses when he felt the rumbling had stopped. He was going to need a long, long drink after this day. He looked down, and when he saw the giants had left, or more specifically when he saw them embracing each other in the rubble below, he knew he had to step in. But, of course, while he made his way down the police helicopters swooped in faster, the officers in them running far too soon to pick up the comatose criminal. And so the boys in blue showed up, taking Angel the Supervillain away, where she would no doubt be asked questions about her absurd strength, or her mysterious employers, or any such questions until she inevitably found a way to escape.

Which just left Big Betty, alone, tired, more than a little beat up after a day of fighting, and way more than a little lost. Youngfist ran through the rubble to meet her. In the distance, half-destroyed skyscrapers still managed to stand, defiant signs of the struggle that had just ended. Yes, in the months to come there would be repairs to be done and bills to be paid and debts to be made up. But right now, right just the fuck now, there was just the matter of Betty, his partner and his friend, to attend to. Betty, who was curled up in a ball in the ruins of downtown.

"So she saw," he said.

"Why didn't you warm me that she could do that?" asked Betty, not looking up from her sleeves. "Why didn't you tell me before she..."

"I was out cold, I had no idea that she was going to do something like that."

Betty remained. Young drew closer.

"The city's safe, the bad guys are gone, you did everything you could do. It's going to be fine, I promise."

Young moved up, taking his seat right beside her. Betty looked up from her shirt. She wasn't looking at Young, but rather at all the expanse of ruined cityscape before her. "Young, do you think I'm a monster?"

Young paused before responding. "Well, you're an asshole, for one, and you're irresponsible, and amoral, and lazy, and chronically late to everything, and unhelpful, but you're also my partner, and the best damn partner a guy could ask for. So no, you're not a monster."

"Thank you."

And the two embraced underneath the fires and the flames, and for a second things were pretty okay.